Tasty Offspring
It's often my observation that patience is not a common trait amongst web designers. We're always clamoring for upcoming developments, such as various CSS3 features, HTML5, and Andy Clarke's newest steamy gypsy romance novel (inside joke there) as quickly as humanly possible. Meanwhile, most browser makers seem determined to implement new features on a timetable that only glaciers can match in slowness. I'd wonder why we're so impatient, but then I consider my lunch of a donut and cola and consider that an average designer's diet probably isn't that conducive to a measured, slow pace.
Fortunately for us, there's impatient people out there that want the features of tomorrow today. And they're a lot smarter than many of us, which they prove by going off and building something neat like Cédric Savarese's nifty javascript technique for CSS3 multicolumn support (which I explored in a post here).
Today, A List Apart featured an article that continues the CSS3 revolution with Alex Bischoff's article Keeping Your Elements' Kids in Line with Offspring.
In short, this REALLY handy script not only lets us simulate child pseudo-classes in IE6 (also known as the diseased black sheep of the browser world), but it also goes the extra mile and provides a whole host of psedo-class-like options for CSS3 pseudo-classes that none of the modern browers support, like nth-child.
I've yet to test it myself, but this looks really robust, and pretty minimal on the speed hit a page takes (they've got a lite version for those just trying to give a bit of 2.1 pseudo-class support to IE6). There's some slight differences in the css selectors you'll make with it, as you'll be using "." for the classes the script enters to simulate pseudoclasses rather than ":". But other than that, it's pretty darn amazing looking.
Extra Credit Challenge – Can anyone think of a way for such a script to be modified to use the ":" in the CSS to reference the classes? I've got some ideas I'm going to have to try when I've got spare time, but I think it's feasible.